The Commune: A Movie for Seattle's Housing Crisis?

Hej, Seattle. Our movie The Commune will give you some ideas on how to live in a fucking expensive city.

Danish director Thomas Vinterberg made his rep with 1998's The Celebration, in which a well-heeled family unravels in spectacular fashion. If The Commune is a sexier, more relaxed picture, Vinterberg, who lived in a Copenhagen commune for 12 years, remains concerned with the ways people de/construct family. (For an even more relaxed take on Scandinavian communes of the 1970s, Lukas Moodysson's Together is the film to beat.)

The experiment in group living begins during a visit to architecture professor Erik Moller's hometown, where wife Anna (Trine Dyrholm), a newscaster, falls in love with the spacious villa. Fourteen-year-old daughter Freja likes it, too, but they can't afford the upkeep, so Anna suggests they invite others to share the expenses. Erik (Ulrich Thomsen, Dyrholm's Celebration co-star) isn't wild about the idea, but Anna, the more dominant personality, proves persuasive, and three becomes nine, including delicate six-year-old Vilads.

Then 24-year-old architecture student Emma (Vinterberg's wife, Helene Reingaard Neumann) and her Brigitte Bardot headbands joins the collective and the focus shifts from communal ups and downs to the unmaking of a strong woman, except Anna's breakdown isn't private, it's public. Dyrholm gives a painfully vulnerable performance, which makes up for a few melodramatic moments towards the end, but that's on the overreaching filmmaker, not the actress, and Dyrholm steamrolls over those shortcomings.